Writes Tyler Austin Harper in "I Teach at an Elite College. Here’s a Look Inside the Racial Gaming of Admissions" (NYT).
Chief Justice John Roberts all but offered a road map to gamification in his majority opinion Thursday, writing, “Nothing prohibits universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected the applicant’s life, so long as that discussion is concretely tied to a quality of character or unique ability that the particular applicant can contribute to the university.”...
See my previous post, using Roberts's words to prompt AI to write the new college essay.
Back to the NYT column:
What advice would I give [students] if I were tutoring again.... Remember that racial gamification is just that: a game.... There are other paths in life that do not require gaming anything. Remember that hope is wherever you find yourself.
Posts
65 comments:
"The rich white kids wanted to know ways to seem less rich and less white."
...Or become more Cherokee. Even if it's only 1/1024th Cherokee, the odds are in your favor. We have examples.
"Chief Justice John Roberts all but offered a road map to gamification"
Looks like it. Big loophole.
"There are other paths in life that do not require gaming anything"
But fewer and fewer. Progs rule by imposing their games. If you get coffee you must play the game of liking Pride propaganda; if you are a company, play the game of doing ESG or acting as if net-zero makes business sense; if you express yourself on social media, play the game of pulling your punches, or else progs wil give you the Justine Sacco treatment; if you are an academic, play the game of taking systemic racism seriously. All things considered, the racial gamification of college admissions, and the cynicism it requires, is excellent training in what prog elites expect of you.
If BIPOC folks want to see their numbers increase at our intuitions of higher learning, they should study harder.
This NYT piece is in the nature of a self-obituary. The game is up, the writer says as much, and while applicants will continue to try to game the system, they will use AI and not a human coach.
I'm guessing that as ChapGPT gets more cunning at churning out the application essays, it will be met with ever-better software screens. Eventually the applicants' offerings and the schools' evaluations will cancel each other out, without human interaction.
I struggle to think of how else the court could have decided. It isn't realistic, imo, to expect any college, much less an "elite" one, to admit students solely on the basis of test scores; some personal component that would indicate why this student's future will reflect well on the university, and of course whether this student is likely to have what it takes to complete the degree, seems to me to be reasonable.
If that is the case (I was going to write "that being the case," but I realize not everyone is going to be willing to concede this point), how do you keep students from writing about their lives? And how do you keep colleges from using the information the students provide to assess their likelihood of short- and long-term success? And these days, one component of success is whether you add "something" to wherever you end up working, and by "something" I mean whether you check a diversity box.
is anyone surprised at Roberts? His whole schtik, follows the Bush family path, pretend to be conservative, while actually undercutting it, and making overt cause with the Left, if neccessary.
He's just a younger, male, Grandma O'Connor.
let's rip the bandaid off of this generational grift. we all know it's 100% fraud.
The face of the New Jim Crow. Discrimination Yesterday. Discrimination Today. Discrimination Forever!
Check out Admission (2013) Tina Fey Paul Rudd, for when getting into Princeton was a bit of gaming but slightly too dysfunctional for the case at hand. Nevertheless more uplifting.
His is not an elite college. Plus he gives blacks a capital b and browns lower case. Racist.
Isn’t the whole point to prevent or at least dis-incentivize the “racial gamification”? My goodness. If the past 25 or 50 years has taught us anything, it’s that this whole system is BS and simply is NOT accomplishing any of the “goals” (even the goals themselves are just movable goalposts). The “educational benefits of diversity” or a “critical mass” of underrepresented races or whatever “holistic” gobbledygook gook they throw around is just a BS justification to play racial games.
It's gamification all the way down. Elementary and secondary schools have their own versions. Answer tests a certain way; do homework a certain way; sit in class a certain way. Individualized reactions are for troublemakers and flunkers.
Universities may define their missions as they see fit. The Constitution defines ours. Courts may not license separating students on the basis of race without an exceedingly persuasive justification that is measurable and concrete enough to permit judicial review. As this Court has repeatedly reaffirmed, “[r]acial classifications are simply too pernicious to permit any but the most exact connection between justification and classification.”
That looks to me like straightforward grounds for suing any university that doesn't make grades and SAT / GRE / LSAT / MCAT scores the basis of their admissions decisions
Chief Justice John Roberts all but offered a road map to gamification in his majority opinion Thursday …
Deliberately so, I’m certain. I thought as much when I read the text you bolded in your post at 9:02 AM.
This is the world we live in, created by PhDs who believe they are the true intellectuals.
Merit is trumped by racial classification.
BTW, I have a PhD earned back in the old days. It never made me an expert at anything.
Austin is simply full of shit if that is what he believes will be the result. It should reduce the gaming of the process of every other ethnicity except for African, and it probably should reduce that, too, if the applicants and the people helping them prepare their applications are honest and thoughtful people. No longer should Asian applicants have to try to hide their ethnicity, nor should they have to try to appear to be something else other than what they are.
"There are other paths in life that do not require gaming anything. Remember that hope is wherever you find yourself."
But dd she refuse to help the students "game" when she was working in that field?
Admission by lottery. What could be more fair than that?
"I teach at an elite college"
I think I found the problem!!!
It also begs the question.....what make a college elite??
College admissions tutoring job??
Is that the counselor that corrects the spelling, and grammar on ALL the applications??
What a shame that colleges did this. They refused to control costs, rising faster than inflation for 40 years. And just like Medicine, the output has gone down, relative to the input.
I'm not saying minority students aren't good input. But if all you focus on the liberalism, wokeness, and skin color...what makes a young person excel beyond the color of their skin?
There was a controversy at Elmhurst College in Elmhurst, IL a few years ago. Private school. Not cheap.
They created full ride scholarships for gay people only. Now, for that much money, why wouldn't you just pretend to be gay? How do they know your not? Do you have to prove it? I don't think they can make you suck a dick in the admissions office. But, then again...who knows...
"Hey can you proofread my scholarship essay"?
"Well...I think there might be some other techniques we have to work on. Latin terms..."
[R]acial gamification... will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions....
I was not expecting this after reading that first excerpted paragraph. When I read that first paragraph, I thought for sure this person was going to say something like, "This decision by the Supreme Court is a good first step at getting to an America where people are seen by others and themself as individuals and not some member of a group." But nope, the author went the other way. The author is incorrect to place blame on the Supreme Court for any increase in "Racial Gamification." If the practices he seems to decry get worse or even stays the same, it is because applicants perceive an advantage or disadvantage as being perceived as any particular race.
madAsHell said...It also begs the question.....what make a college elite??
Bullshit marketing. College "elite" status is the Emperors New Clothes. And the only reason they want "elite" status is for $$$$. So people like Senator Elizabeth Warren can make $750k a year and pretend they are champions of the poor.
I have never heard of Bates College. Truth.
What amazes me is how few, if any, well employed people inside the University System call bullshit on any of this. Are these "intellectuals" really that programmed? Or, are they just protecting their access to the ripe fruit. It would be one hell of a club to get kicked out of. Especially if you had to go make it in the private sector. You might find yourself among the ditch diggers you pretend to defend.
But I get it. Look at Jordon Peterson. They want to send his ass to re-education camp.
Remember how Jerry Maguire put in all on the line?? I realize that's fantasy. Especially that he ended up with a 26-year-old smokin' hot Renee Zellwiger. But that's beside the point. It's the premise dammit!
90 percent of the Black and Hispanic students went to the same schools, and grew up in the same neighborhoods as the white and Asian students A.A. does not raise up the poor from crappy neighborhoods. It allows Black and Hispanic kids from middle and upper middle class backgrounds into more prestigious universities than they otherwise would have gotten in to.
I am a white male. I graduated from a small DoD high school in England in 1983. We had no honors or AP classes, and they tested me for GATE the second semester of my senior year. I killed the ASVAB (99%) and PSAT. I showed up for the SAT hung over and scored an 1180 the only time I took it. I graduated with a 2.5 G.P.A. because I never did any homework and aced the tests. The only kid smarter than me in the school also posts on this site (Jamie).
Nobody at the school ever talked to me about applying for college and financial aid until March of my senior year. My parents attended college at night while my Dad was in the Air Force and knew nothing about regular college. My plan was to get a Eurail pass, a good bike and spend a year bumming around continental Europe before even thinking of college.
March of my senior year, my counselor calls me into her office and asks me what schools I've been accepted to. She expected me to give her a list of colleges she could brag about to counselors from the other American high schools in England. Her reaction when I told her I hadn't applied to any colleges was very dramatic. After she recovered, she called my dad at work. Long story short they made me apply. I thought I was brilliant, and I only applied to one college (University of Southern California) with the expectation that I would be rejected and could spend my year as a bum. Six weeks later an acceptance letter arrived in the mail and I had to pretend I was happy about it.
To this day, I don't understand how I got in.
When will some "second tier" Ivy (maybe a small college like Williams or Saint Mary's in Maryland, or maybe a state college in a Republican state like University of Central Florida) adopt an explicit policy of merit based admissions, combined with a hiring tenure policy that puts more emphasis on teaching and less on reputation of faculty research and graduate programs)? The objective would be that employers want to employ graduates from this institution, and graduate programs want to recruit undergrads from this institution. Places like Princeton and University of Wisconsin put most of their attention on maintaining the reputations of their faculty research output and quality of graduate programs (and I suppose a little emphasis on DEI). It seems to me like there is a niche for an institution that emphasizes quality of undergraduates.
Admissions essays are generally read by liberal arts graduates who couldn't get real jobs. They love this stuff.
With all of this, I have not seen one comment about legacy admissions. Do you think you that George W Bush would have gotten into Yale if his father and grandfather had not gone there? Or that Jared Kushner would have got into Harvard if his dad hadn't bribed it to the tune of $2.5 million? Legacy admissions at those two schools varies from 10 to 15%.
When you actually care about affirmative action for rich white kids, then maybe I will believe you when you are appalled that they are giving a preference to other minorities.
"[R]acial gamification... will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions.... Writing college essays will descend further into a perverse, racialized version of the Keynesian beauty contest...."
As opposed to just checking the box labeled with the appropriate racial/ethnic category. Because that's how things ought to be, instead of making the kids prove they have actual qualifications. (sorry--low form of humor there).
And since the essays will be written by bots, what is left but...the tests!
Play hockey, or the violin.
I have never heard of Bates College.
Have you been under a rock?? It's right next to the motel!!!
Exactly.
It’s a game because college admission is a path to prestige.
We always let the colleges determine for themselves to whom and for what purpose they would apportion or restrict that prestige, and now the court feels that it can intervene for the sake of the poor prestige-deprived white and Asian kids that it will improve their chances of a fair shot in life. As if they lacked on. And how? By presuming to know better than the colleges how their prestigious imprimaturs should be distributed.
What bullshit. This is nothing more than a guilt offering by a court that will find every way it can to disenfranchise the voters and disempower the poor. Now it presumes to know how to racially “unbalance” the prestige of a college education, so as to “rebalance” it in the way they pontificate as being fair.
It takes more arrogance and ignorance to pursue that farcical a mission than exists in the entire world.
With all of this, I have not seen one comment about legacy admissions.
Because that's not the subject at hand, Brewmeister Freder.
With all of this, I have not seen one comment about legacy admissions. Do you think you that George W Bush would have gotten into Yale if his father and grandfather had not gone there?
Fat chance getting the elite conservative conformist theocratic corporatist crackers to see a 14th amendment violation with that form of favoritism. Just with blacks and Latin students getting a chance to make up for what their racially oppressed upbringings left them without.
"I have never heard of Bates College."
madAsHell said...
Have you been under a rock?? It's right next to the motel!!!
And they have a notable masters program, too!!!
When you actually care about affirmative action for rich white kids, then maybe I will believe you when you are appalled that they are giving a preference to other minorities.
Freder at it again. Rich white kids run this country. They have been privileged since they were born. We all know that. The issue is merit. Sending a black kid to medical school with an IQ of 85 might just have consequences. Pete Buttplug as Transportation Sec does almost no harm as his department is run by bureaucrats. Get used to it.
Ditto for the Latino and Middle Eastern kids. Seemingly everyone I interacted with as a tutor — white or brown, rich or poor, student or parent — believed that getting into an elite college required what I came to call racial gamification.
The professor call it "racial gamification", Hilaria Baldwin calls it "culturally fluid".
You say tomato, I say tomato
You eat potato and I eat potato
Tomato, tomato, potato, potato
Let's call the whole thing off
But oh, if we call the whole thing off then we must part
And oh, if we ever part then that might break my heart
“If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” ― William Shakespeare
As maybe quoted by the rejected Chinese students.
Jamie said...
I struggle to think of how else the court could have decided. It isn't realistic, imo, to expect any college, much less an "elite" one, to admit students solely on the basis of test scores;
Yes, it is. It's entirely realitic to demand that schools do the vast majority of their admissions based on GPA plus test scores, because that is the best predictor of academic success out there.
So now what we need to have happen is for people to start suing schools that drop the SAT / grades, and then win the lawsuits because the school's lack of objective criteria means they have no defense against charges of racism.
Now, does the school want to throw in some other objective criteria, like "geographic diversity"? No problem.
But if their "geographic diversity" turns into a cover for racism, they should again get sued, and lose millions of dollars.
Our college system SHOULD be "segregated" based upon individual educational ability. If that means the "top schools" are mostly Asian, then that's what happens.
It's time for actually meritocracy
Freder @ 5:08: I’ll start to care about your dudgeon about legacies or athletes when the Constitution is amended to prohibit discrimination by the state on the basis of family connections or RBI’s.
When you actually care about affirmative action for rich white kids
I'm totally opposed to it, which is why I favor going back to a strict "grades plus test scores" admissions policy.
Because that policy is the hardest thing for the rich parents to game.
Essays? "Extra curricular activities"? THOSE are things you can buy
A National Merit Scholarship, OTOH, is not something they can buy
Gahrie said...
March of my senior year, my counselor calls me into her office and asks me what schools I've been accepted to. She expected me to give her a list of colleges she could brag about to counselors from the other American high schools in England. Her reaction when I told her I hadn't applied to any colleges was very dramatic. After she recovered, she called my dad at work. Long story short they made me apply. I thought I was brilliant, and I only applied to one college (University of Southern California) with the expectation that I would be rejected and could spend my year as a bum. Six weeks later an acceptance letter arrived in the mail and I had to pretend I was happy about it.
To this day, I don't understand how I got in.
Were you a national merit scholar semi-finalist?
What happened was that your counselor knew someone at USC, and was able to talk you up to said person. Did you get scholarships from USC? From the Air Force?
Because if you were coming to USC on outside money with high test scores, and your counselor new someone in USC admissions, this is not a surprise. :-)
Freder Frederson said...
With all of this, I have not seen one comment about legacy admissions.
Well, when you spend your life walking around with your head up your ass, it's hard to hear much of anything.
But tell us, Freder, which of you proud leftists have been filing lawsuits against schools for teh way they let in legacies?
What's that? it never bothered any of you, and you all love special treatment for legacies?
Yeah, thought so
"Play hockey, or the violin."
Embrace the power of "and".
I spent my career in public higher ed, and if I thought the system was reformable I'd have lots to say. This may begin a process of reform but I won't hold my breath.
We have systemic, fractal corruption in all our institutions and professions.
That's an odd misuse of the word behest. Behest is an order of a mandatory nature. This guy is talking about people imploring or entreating him for help with their attempts to package themselves as the craven fools they long to be.
[R]acial gamification... will only get worse now that the Supreme Court has rejected affirmative action in college admissions.... Writing college essays will descend further into a perverse, racialized version of the Keynesian beauty contest....
I think this projection is absolutely correct. But let's place the blame where it belongs. The projection is correct because it rests on the assumption -- which I also believe to be correct -- that the institutions affected by this ruling are determined to engage in active and widespread racial discrimination come hell or high water, no matter what the law, ethics, morality, or public opinion say. That institutional dedication to the quasi-moral principle of racial discrimination is why the struggle to game the system is going to get worse. Not the Supreme Court. If those institutions accepted that racial discrimination is actually wrong, and should be applied sparingly, well, Asians wouldn't have to downplay or conceal thrir racial background.
Babylon Bee:
"Awkward: Supreme Court Rules Against Affirmative Action With Affirmative Action Hire Sitting Right There"
Mic drop...
Freder Frederson said: "With all of this, I have not seen one comment about legacy admissions. Do you think you that George W Bush would have gotten into Yale if his father and grandfather had not gone there? Or that Jared Kushner would have got into Harvard if his dad hadn't bribed it to the tune of $2.5 million? Legacy admissions at those two schools varies from 10 to 15%."
Dude, you left out a bunch of Kennedy kids from your complaint, so you're showing more than a bit of political bias, and such omissions undermine the validity of your argument. As Bill Clinton wisely observed, "There's more than enough blame to go around for everyone to get a fair share."
I agree legacy admissions are a joke (we had at least one such challenged classmate at Stanford Medical School when I was a student there), and they should be abolished. Along with admission based on skin color and ethnicity.
If you want a highly successful, competent society, then you select on merit.
Were you a national merit scholar semi-finalist?
Yes.
What happened was that your counselor knew someone at USC, and was able to talk you up to said person.
Extremely doubtful.
Did you get scholarships from USC? From the Air Force?
Nope. Pell grant, Cal grant, work study, and loans.
I will say this, my extra-curriculars were fairly impressive.
Legacy admissions are usually capable of doing college work.
Affirmative action and the related gamification gets such "marginalized" people as Taylor Lorenz and Carlos Maza into elite universities (OK, we got our hispanics). I guarantee you, neither of those two were picking lettuce out near Fresno.
Don't get me started on the "well rounded person" game these places. All the concertos and baseball tournaments attended only by the parents of kids who can afford to do those things are just boxes to tick off so they can "tell their story" in order to get a discount off the universities highly inflated prices (Oooh! I got a scholarship!). Give me a lettuce picker over them. At least they know what an honest day's work is.
Michael K said...
Pete Buttplug as Transportation Sec does almost no harm as his department is run by bureaucrats.
Good thing you threw in the word almost. I recall the supply chain issues while Pete was on maternity leave.
Very struck by the highly rated comments there. Seems a lot of people are "getting it," that the real problem with our college system is the overvaluation of so-called "elite" universities. They are able to overcharge, underdeliver, and create an indoctrinated "elite" class based on historical reputation. The internet has done much to equalize the delivery of quality education. We need to start acting like it.
"It isn't realistic, imo, to expect any college, much less an "elite" one, to admit students solely on the basis of test scores;"
Yes, it is. It's entirely realitic to demand that schools do the vast majority of their admissions based on GPA plus test scores, because that is the best predictor of academic success out there.
That's why I said "solely."
I completely agree that grades and test scores predict academic success very accurately. I'm a shining example of that. My grades and test scores were very very good (a lot better than Gahrie's, if he reports them accurately - hey, Gahrie!). At that same tiny DoDDS school in Suffolk, UK (my class had 48 students), with no AP classes and no after-school tutoring and no ability to visit colleges and very little on-campus recruiting, I applied to the three schools that bothered to come to visit us, got into all three although two of them were very exclusive indeed, and ended up going to none of them, because despite my stellar scores and grades (and an extracurricular record similar to Gahrie's - I didn't do a sport, unlike him, but I did EVERYTHING else), I was too fundamentally dumb to know I should apply for financial aid.
I agree with Gahrie that the school counselor didn't know anybody anywhere. Her concerns were the young GIs who were always around, the resulting pregnant girls and ready availability of drugs, and trying to get us all graduated and back to the States. I can't even remember what she looked like or ever meeting with her.
So anyway. I excelled academically in the cheap state college I did attend, got a job, started a career... and utterly failed to set the world on fire. Would going to the university I'd originally accepted have given me what I needed to achieve material and career success? Maybe... Maybe their network would have carried me. But my real problem was lack of career ambition, and I doubt that even that university would have fixed me. Why those three schools didn't pick up on my deficit, I don't know - but I'll bet they put a lot of weight on my academic performance. For one of them, I might have been an AA candidate, as a female applicant. For all three, I would have looked great on paper, and I wrote well enough to fool them about my actual career potential, apparently.
Luckily for me, I met a guy at that cheap state college who enabled me to fulfill my real ambition - I have three grown kids - while also fulfilling his own much greater career ambitions via his much greater potential, plus he's a lot of fun.
Heh. Another student at our little high school went to Bates, I just remembered. He was voted Best All-Around, if I recall... Super nice guy, and my debate partner.
Listening to the squealing by leftist sorta-useful idiots like Freder and puddinghead makes me think my estimation the elites discovered about two decades ago using 'varied life experiences' as admissions criteria was a good way to screen out poor white but academically gifted kids while ensuring their spawn would be unchallenged by the generally unqualified students admitted to provide 'diversity' was spot-on.
If you capitalize black, I stop reading. If you capitalize black and not white, I pay no attention whatsoever.
“Do you think you that George W Bush would have gotten into Yale if his father and grandfather had not gone there? Or that Jared Kushner would have got into Harvard if his dad hadn't bribed it to the tune of $2.5 million? Legacy admissions at those two schools varies from 10 to 15%.”
Okay. So you’re saying that the people running the colleges are money grubbing assholes who need to make up for the full rides they’re giving to the diverse students by fleecing the legacy or other well heeled admits. It’s obviously worked out just fine for the colleges until now.
I’m good with ending every kind of affirmative action.
There’s been no lawsuit against legacy admissions (yet) for the simple reason that more dumb children of rich white Democrats benefit from it than any other category of people.
- Rafe
If you capitalize black, I stop reading. If you capitalize black and not white, I pay no attention whatsoever.
I have no problem capitalizing "Black" when it refers to people, but if you do (as I do) you must capitalize "White" also.
Heh. Another student at our little high school went to Bates, I just remembered. He was voted Best All-Around, if I recall... Super nice guy, and my debate partner.
And son of two teachers at the school.
And I was voted class clown.
I scuffed through our mediocre public schools and right into a mediocre state u (just down the street), almost entirely, I have to assume, on the basis of SAT (and the other one) scores. My GPA was probably in the top 50% of my class of 600+ (1971).
There were some AP courses offered, I think, and we had some National Merit Scholars and the like, but I didn't run in those circles and none of my close friends went anywhere elite for college. Some did get into good grad programs later, though.
I vaguely recall guidance counseling but ended up applying only to MSU. I had my scores sent to Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College, a sorta-semi elite place for the Southland) also, since my (deceased in '63) father was a graduate, but I never applied because I knew I'd never get, or fit, in. One of my best friends from HS went there--he had good tests, good GPA, and daddybucks--as did one of my wife's besties, similarly well prepared.
Neither one has been more happy or successful than we have.
Seems a lot of people are "getting it," that the real problem with our college system is the overvaluation of so-called "elite" universities.
I’ve been retired for almost 8 years, but back in the day I refused even to interview potential college hires from the Ivy League. Too many young people who didn’t think they needed to prove themselves on a real world project. They came from an Ivy, what proof did they need? Well, dawg, that piece of paper you got at commencement won’t write, test, or debug any code. You had a great high school career and you have been coasting on that ever since. But I don’t need coasters; I need working code.
Freder: the court only addresses questions brought before it. If you want legacy admissions addressed then you must bring those up in district court first.
This lesson brought to by high school government courses.
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